How to market psychodrama training to doctors, attorneys?

Karen Carnabucci of Racine, Wis. writes:

“I’m a psychotherapist working with psychodrama, the creative arts therapies and experiential therapies and I’ve been building my practice slowly and patiently.

“Most of my clients have insurance benefits which they use when they see me. Now I want to shift my practice to offer training to helping professionals, physicians and attorneys who will benefit from these skills that I’ve been using.

“Physicians, for example, can learn to communicate more effectively with their patients, especially in telling bad news so that the patient and family can receive the news in an emotionally healthy way. Attorneys, especially defense attorneys, can deepen their understanding of the client’s case so they can communicate the essentials to the jury to win cases.

“I’m looking for ideas on how to draw professionals primarily from the upper Midwest to my training programs, individual consultations and in-service programs and would welcome ideas from your Hounds. My blog is at http://midwestpsychodrama.blogspot.com.

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{ 7 Responses }

The audience you seek is also a very very busy one not likely to take the time to learn new techniques for themselves especially if not in their related field. However, you might catch their attention at one of their conferences or conventions and get yourself on the agenda as a speaker, maybe a warm up act to a key speaker. If you create a presentation that can demonstate your product in a light hearted way, with a serious applicable message, I think you would be rememebered. Be sure to have your card on hand OR a post card with a trial offer for convention participants.

Also, you might consider providing an offer for dealing with their difficult cases or situation and give them a trial – send it in the mail.

Lastly, i believe this group, is kinda of conservative and would likely be more open to your services through a direct referral by someone they know and trust.

Why not contact organisors responsible for finding guest speakers at major conferences for Doctors or Lawyers. You might offer to perform a small role play based on a real life topical situation (you could easily find something appropriate through your local or national media). If you offered to do this for nothing as an introductory offer only they might give you a chance. You could create a ‘before’ and ‘after’ scenario. The ‘before’ scenario might show your audience how difficult situations are usually handled then you could show them just how much better the same situation could be handled.

You might then ask the audience for a) feedback and b)suggestions for other difficult situations they might have to face in their day to day duties, offering them some alternative ways to deal with them.

If you manage to go to one of these conferences, make sure to take plenty of your own business cards and collect plenty of others.

I would create a separate blog/blogs that speaks directly to these two audiences (physicians and attorneys).

Share thoughts and tips in posts and at the end of those, post links to information about your training programs. Make the posts quick and simple so these busy professionals may read them on the run…but make them attractive and entertaining enough that they will keep coming back.

Don’t forget about the value of using social media to spread the work and links to those blog posts.

One of my clients is a Dallas NLP group, with similar client demographics and value proposition as your new market, so I was interested to see what you were doing. Here’s a quick review.

1) Navigation at your site is difficult. No sidebars, so the visitor has to click little bitty links. Does this really work for your client demographic?

I was going to say it looks like a flat brochure, but it’s more like a newspaper column. The site makes no attempt to differentiate between different types of data. No use of fonts, colors, layout. All this in a site supposedly devoted to creativity. The word “incongruent” comes to mind.

So, first order of business, get a professional web designer or a talented friend to redesign the site to be more welcoming, colorful, easily navigated and targetted towards your desired demographics.

2) The name “PsychoDrama” may be a psychological tech term with positive intent, but it is a big red flag to me. It has the connotation among normal Americans of unnecessary emotion in a situation — the way a “drama queen” acts. This is not a big draw for professionals, who want *less* drama in their professional lives.

So, if you want to attract professionals, I’d recommend setting up a separate site, with a name designed to draw rather than repel professionals. Please don’t try to defend or explain the name — you can’t educate someone on the “real” meaning of something if they won’t stop to listen, and professionals don’t have time for psychodrama, as they see it.

3) Your lakehousecenter.com Training Series Schedule gives the dates and titles of various classes, but no enticing blurb for each. This is a missed opportunity.

I understand that all that information is in the Catalog PDF– which I found fairly well written — but if you are targetting busy professionals, you need to give them exactly what they want when they want it, and NOT make them click around your site looking for stuff.

You can achieve this effect without adding clutter — just put collapsed/hidden text beneath each course title on the Schedule page, where the visitor can click to reveal the further information. If the web page code is well written, you can collect valuable information based upon these clicks to discover which courses interest your visitors and which do not.

Also, be sure to get rid of data on courses more than 60 days in the past– having six month old courses on the web “Course Schedule” is a red-flag that your site is stale. It could be worse, though. This year I’ve seen live sites, from live businesses, that were touting classes “upcoming” in fall of 2007.

4) Your update frequency on your blog is barely sufficient to encourage repeat visitors. Consider having a short series on a related subject, updated M-W-F or T-TH. For example, your April 26th post could easily have been presented as a three-post series on Creativity, with each post related but slightly different. The frequency of update will also tend to increase your place in the search rankings.

5) For Golly’s sake set up an FAQ page. If your CEUs are applicable to LPCs, LMFTs, LSWs and so on, put that information on the FAQ page. Saying which boards have approved your courses and CEs may or may not work for most LPC-types.

The biggest way to boost your conversion rate is to answer the questions your visitors are asking, in the words they are asking them in.

6) Consider NLP as an adjunct to your existing training subjects. It has a large public awareness quotient, world famous proponents like Tony Robbins, and a pro-business positioning that might bleed off into your other business positioning. I don’t know how much effort it might be to get an NLP trainer to give an occasional class at the Lake House Center, but it could be a very useful alliance.

It is important that you tie your offering to an outcome that is on their mind. Lead with a tangible result, compel them to take some action such as joining your list and then educate them on your work.

You can do this by sponsoring or being an advertiser for an upcoming professional meeting/conference, submitting an article for a trade journal, or contacting the leader of a professional association with a list of presentation topics.

Be sure that the topics are outcome focused such as “Better Serving Clients” or “Building Your Practice” and that you gather names on the spot or leave your audience (readers or attendees) with a teaser that will bring them to your website. Then you can provide opportunities and content that build trust and credibility and ultimately lead them to working with you.

Keep in mind that on average, a physician spends only 11 minutes with a patient, so being able to communicate effectively in such a short time is something that is of interest to them. Target your content and descriptions of content to specific WIFMs (what’s in it for me) for specific medical professionals. Think beyond physicians to PAs, RNs, LPNs, and nurses with specific certifications (i.e., Hospice Nurse). Another group to keep in mind is administrators at long-term care and retirement communities who often are dealing with bad news when having to inform a family that mom or dad needs more assistance and has to move to assisted living or health care.

The suggestions to tie into professional conferences are right on target. Take this to the next level, and find out whether your presentation at the conference will be part of the CEU credits offered. If not, see if the conference organizers will work with you to get your presentation submitted so it earns CEU credit. This would pave the way towards getting your workshops submitted for CEUs through national groups such as the American Medical Association, as you’ve done with therapy organizations. This helps ensure an audience at your part of the conference.

Physicians, nurses and other medical professionals all need a certain number of CEUs for annual re-certification. This offers the opportunity to target not only professionals, but also health care organizations when your workshops have CEU credits attached. Many larger organizations provide CEU opportunities for their staff.

You may want to start by working through the state agency that represents CMS (Dept. of Health and Welfare generally), to submit the objectives, outline of the workshop, your credentials, etc. in order to receive the approval for CEUs which would make it easier to apply to the national American Medical Society for instance.

Another advantage of having approved presentations is that you can also provide the information to medical society newsletters, nursing news vehicles, and other targeted publications.

Also, consider taking your workshop “on the road” or to the web with webinars. The weibnar may also be a great vehicle to attract leads and build a professional database of people to send information on the workshops. In these days of belt-tightening at every level, webinars provide health care providers with an opportunity for staff to gain training without the expense of travel.

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